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OPM to clarify how applicants list education on jobs site

By Jason Miller

Mar 26, 2004

The Office of Personnel Management is trying to stop potential government employees from highlighting bogus degrees on their resumes. Officials are adding information to the USAjobs.opm.gov site's resume builder about how job seekers should report their education.

Claire Gibbons, Recruitment One-Stop project manager, said earlier this week that her office is working with OPM's policy shop to draft a fact sheet for potential employees about the consequences of misrepresenting educational achievements.

'We don't want to discount nonaccredited education, but we want to segment it out,' Gibbons said. 'We want job-seekers to know what to report and how to characterize it. We don't what to put job-seekers in a position of not knowing what to report.'

Clarence Crawford, OPM's chief financial officer and associate director for management, said the new information will protect agencies from applicants who misrepresent their educational accomplishments or list bogus degrees.

This new information is a part of a broader update to the Web site, officials said.

Norm Enger, OPM's e-government initiatives project director, earlier this week told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census, that by early summer the jobs portal will streamline the application process and give job-seekers real-time access to information regarding the status of their application.

Since August 2003, the jobs site has had 45 million visits. Federal agencies listed 18,000 jobs, including 861 federal IT vacancies last month alone, and 400,000 new resumes have been posted online.